Impact of Biofuels on the Oxidation Stability and Combustion Pollutants of Heavy Duty and Jet Fuels

Reducing greenhouse gas and harmful emissions in the transport sector is a crucial issue in the fight against climate change and air pollution.

The use of sustainable biofuels remains the solution of choice to reduce the carbon footprint of propulsion systems that are difficult or impossible to electrify, such as those for aviation or road freight transports.

The addition of biofuels to conventional fuels strongly affects their oxidation stability, leading to changes in their chemical and physical structures, which in turn affects the combustion engines functioning in terms of efficiency, safety and pollutant emissions.

The synergistic effects of the oxidation of liquid fuels (aging), the action of antioxidant additives, and their consequences on the reactivity and pollutant emissions during their combustion remain unexplored.

This project aims at promoting the development of sustainable biofuels and antioxidants for heavy-duty transports by bringing a new fundamental understanding of their coupled effects on conventional fuels, throughout all their chain of use, from storage to combustion.

Unprecedented well-defined kinetic experiments to study the oxidation stability of liquid fuels will be developed and directly coupled with a gas-phase combustion reactor. Key intermediates and pollutants will be quantified in the liquid- and gas-phase reactors.

Detailed kinetic models will be developed and validated for liquid-phase oxidation and gas-phase combustion, using an original approach based on theoretical chemistry for the challenging liquid-phase models.

This project will set new standards in the research field of biofuel combustion properties by integrating the crucial step of fuel aging, a neglected source of pollutants.

It will push the frontier of knowledge on oxidation stability of fuels and antioxidants properties, and lead to new scientific tools and concepts to understand, design and optimize biofuel/antioxidants mixtures throughout all their chain of use.